Camera equipment program

Revision as of 12:12, 3 September 2011 by John Vandenberg (talk | contribs) (reorganise)
This page is a proposal being developed by our members.  The proposal was moved by John Vandenberg and seconded by Peter Jeremy. If you are not a member of the organisation, you may request an account on this wiki using special:RequestAccount, and discuss this proposal on the discussion page.


In order to support free culture photography of Australian topics, this Wikimedia Australia program will provide photographers with consistent and dependable funding to update their equipment periodically as technology improves and equipment wears out.

In our community are many photographers who have consistently contributed Australian photographs to Wikimedia over many years, often contributing thousands of photographs which are viewed every day by the Australia public. This program is targeted at investing in new equipment for these community members, based on prior performance, and providing incentives for additional community members to become regular contributors of Australian photographs. As such, this program favour quantity. Wikimedia Australia will develop other programs, projects and prizes to specifically reward quality photos. (e.g. Wikipedia loves ... my town)

To achieve the goals of this program, minimum quality thresholds are defined for eligible photographs, favouring machine verifiable checks where possible. The photographs of eligible applicants are public, allowing the community to review whether each collection of photographs meets the spirit of the conditions.

Conditions

The conditions ensure that the photographers collection of work include many distinct subjects, that the photographs are sufficiently high quality to be useful, and the photographs can be readily found using finding aids such as categorisation, geotagging, and use on a Wikimedia project.

In order to qualify, photographs must

  • be uploaded onto Wikimedia Commons under an licence listed at commons:Commons:Copyright tags
  • be geotagged to an accuracy of 10 km2
  • depict a subject within Australia, or in Australian territorial waters
  • be described
  • be placed into at least two subject categories on Wikimedia Commons
  • be dated with suitable granularity, and placed into the appropriate "<year> in Australia" category:
    1. photographs prior to 2000 only need a year
    2. photographs in or after 2000 must also include a month
  • be of an appropriate resolution
    1. images uploaded before 1 January 2009 must be 800 pixel on the shortest edge
    2. images uploaded on or after 1 January 2009 must be 1000 pixel on the shortest edge

Grants

Kickstart grant

Wikimedia Australia will grant applicants up to $200 for photography equipment when they have loaded 1000 eligible photos onto Wikimedia Commons, including photographs by other people, categorised them into 1000 different categories, of which 50% (500) must have been in use in Wikimedia content for three months.

Applicants can only receive this grant once.

Small equipment grant

Wikimedia Australia will grant applicants up to $500 for photography equipment when the first 500 of their own freely licensed eligible photos have been loaded onto Wikimedia Commons, categorised into 500 different categories, of which 100% (500) must have been in use in Wikimedia content for three months.

Applicants can only receive this grant once.

Large equipment grant

Wikimedia Australia will grant applicants $1000 for photography equipment for each 2000 of their freely licensed eligible photos which have been loaded onto Wikimedia Commons, categorised into 1000 different categories, of which 25% (500) must have been in use in Wikimedia content for three months.

Applications can only receive this grant once every financial year. A committee super-majority is needed for grants of more than $2000 within 24 months. The maximum an applicant can request under this program is $5000 for each 24 month period.

Audit and reporting

It will be the responsibility of the applicant to categorise their photographs into a single hidden category on Commons (see mw:Help:Categories#Hidden categories), and identify the photographs which have been in use in Wikimedia content for three months.

Wikimedia Australia will develop an open source script which generates a reports on a category of photographs, providing an overview of technical compatibility with the conditions detailed above. Wikimedia Australia will publish a leader-board of the results on the organisations public website. Any community member with more than 500 uploads may be included on the published leaderboard, at their request.

The committee will ensure that the Wikimedia community has had sufficient opportunity to review an applicants collection of photographs to ensure they are within Commons policies, such as commons:COM:SCOPE, and meet the spirit of the outlined conditions for this program.

Wikimedia Australia committee members are not required or expected to verify that all photographs are compliant with all of the conditions. The grant conditions may be waived by the Wikimedia Australia committee for special cases by a super-majority vote. The final decision will be at the discretion of the committee, and that in some instances applications who do not meet the specific technical requirements may be included in the program.

Successful recipients will be listed on the Wikimedia Australia website by their Commons username.

Recipients of grants in this program must agree to upload 500 photographs (as defined above) to Wikimedia Commons within 24 months.

Other information

This grant can be retrospectively for receipts of camera equipment purchased 12 months prior to the grant application.

The applicant for the two equipment grants does not need to upload the images to Commons. They could be a flickr user, or upload their images to their own website. Enterprising Commons users could receive a "Kickstart grant" by uploading a large set of images to Commons and categorising them.

If the applicant has successfully applied for funds under this program, or received more than AUD$100 within the prior 24 months for photography or photography equipment from other grant or prizes, those amounts received will be deducted from the grant amount available under this program.

This means that there must be a 24 month between a small grant and a "Kickstart grant".
However a recipient of a small grant can receive another $300 via the "Small equipment grant" within the 24 months.

Program budget

WMAU needs to allocate $10000 to this program for the 2011-2012 financial year as there are quite a few photographers who already meet the criteria and could apply at any time, and several of them are likely to apply once they learn of this program and have improved the metadata of their images.

$4000 in large equipment grants
$4000 in small equipment grants ($500 x 8)
$2000 for the kickstart grant ($200 x 10)

The budget for the next financial year will be determined by the committee after the program has been reviewed.

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